Catch and Release
by alienheartattack
Summary: Just as soon as she has him, she doesn't. Mikasa is one step closer to unlocking the legacy of her lineage when she loses the only link she has to her family. Canonverse, but I fudged a few details. COMPLETE


"Don't tell anyone," he says.

"Tell anyone what, Captain?" she asks, looking up at him as she cleans and polishes her three-dimensional maneuvering gear. Three months earlier she would have glared up at him wordlessly, her jaw set in a fierce, hard line. Now she simply looks up at him with the earnest respect of a well-trained soldier before her superior officer.

Even as her dark eyes bore into him, the licking flames of the campfire reflected in their infinite depths, her hands are moving, working a rag in tight little circles over the steel alloy.

"My last name."

Mikasa freezes. Levi has always been simply Levi. A last name would mean that he is human, that he is simply one of them.

The wind does not have a family name. Why should the captain?

"Levi Ackerman," he says, but it comes out in a whisper. Mikasa's eyes widen and her mouth opens but before anything can come out Levi clamps his hand over her lips. "Not a word," he says. His eyes flash the same cold silver as her blades, but she knows that he is deadlier.

She nods beneath his hand (which is warm and surprisingly soft and smells ever so slightly of — she inhales — _lilac?_) so he removes it.

"Why didn't you tell me?" Mikasa asks.

"Might just be a coincidence. It's a common name."

She shakes her head. "It used to be. Not anymore."

Levi grunts his reply, something that sounds like "I know."

"So what does that mean?"

He shrugs. "I don't know. But it probably means something."

Mikasa looks down at the ground, then back at Levi. She cannot see any trace of her father in his face but she embraces him nonetheless, soaking his hair with her tears.

She barely has him for a week before one of his gas canisters malfunctions mid-flight and he starts to fall. An enormous hand catches him out of midair and within seconds Levi is gone. He doesn't make a sound, not even when the Titan's teeth rip open his belly and bare his guts to the last few people who ever loved him.

Levi Ackerman, resigned to history.

The remaining members of Squad Levi — if such a thing can even exist now — are frozen as they stand, but the sight of their Captain's body looking so small and so frail in the grip of the Titan, crushing his powerful limbs so tightly that even he could not move.

Mikasa does not remember seeing him die. She only remembers flight and steel and blood and steam, an inhuman shriek that never ends. She remembers waking up and finding herself bound, thick ropes coiled around her wrists and ankles, as she lays on the muddy ground.

"We're not letting you go back there," Eren says from between gritted teeth. Armin stands next to him, his blue eyes crystalline with tears. Mikasa realizes it is the first time in a long time she has seen him shocked into speechlessness. Jean, for some reason, looks like he's about to cry. Mikasa cannot imagine why; _he_ still has a family.

"I've never heard you scream like that before," Armin murmurs.

"You'd be sad if I died," Mikasa answers plainly.

Eren frowns. "Of course we would be. Are you insane?"

"I had to do this."

He scoffs. "What, stupidly risk your life because you're upset that the Captain died? Fuck no! We're all upset that Levi is dead!" His voice breaks a little on that last word, so sudden and so final. It does not seem possible that Humanity's Greatest Weapon could be destroyed so easily. "Dying for him would be spitting on his memory. He would want you to live."

"I would die for my family," she says. "I have died so many times already. What's the difference if I do it again?" Mikasa turns her head away then, and doesn't see the question writ large on her fellow soldiers' faces: _They were family?_

She doesn't clarify, because deep down she doesn't know. And now she never will.

After the Captain dies, it doesn't feel right to keep going. Not wanting to disband the Special Operations Squad, Erwin promotes Mikasa to squad leader, something utterly unheard of even in a fly-by-night operation like the Survey Corps. Even with the additional responsibilities Mikasa finds herself looking forward to bed each night, waiting for the black grip of sleep to claim her. At night she can disappear into a world where Levi still exists, where he can tell her something about the Ackerman clan. She waits for him in her dreams each night, hoping he'll appear to her and give her a piece of wisdom, a key to unlocking a mystery she did not even know existed before now.

She'll settle for him calling her a stupid brat. She'd love to hear him berate her for her actions after she saw Levi's boots disappear down the Titan's gore-streaked maw. She knows she deserves a dressing-down from him that will never occur.

"I don't give a shit that you killed four Titans," he would say. "You were being a fucking moron."

Mikasa wants Levi to come back, if only so he could see her smiling at the thought of him yelling at her. She would give her right arm if he would come back and make her run laps until she collapses. She would love to feel the burn of lactic acid in her muscles as she sprints beneath his watchful gaze.

So she runs, trying to find him in the familiar strain of physical exertion. And she keeps going, twenty laps around camp, forty, sixty. After eighty-two laps her knees won't cooperate so she slows to a walk, then a stiff shamble.

When exhaustion finally grips her, it is not enough.

She keeps living whether she likes it or not. Her body, independent of her self-annihilating brain, rises each morning, trains the squad, reviews battle plans, meets with Erwin. Even punishing herself, exercising to exhaustion at every opportunity, she can't stop. She goes to bed praying not to wake up the next morning but her traitorous eyes flutter open without fail as the sun rises.

One day, deep in a forest on another futile mission, she decides that it is time her body learned the lesson that she has tried in vain to teach it. Before the squad dismounts from their horses and switches to 3DMG, Mikasa tells Jean he's in charge if she dies, that Armin should be his second in command. She makes him promise.

"But why?" Jean asks her, his brow furrowing with concern. "You'll be fine."

"Captain Levi wasn't fine, and he was the best of all of us. I can't afford to take that chance."

When she fights, she dodges Titans without even thinking, the fire in her blood doing most of the work for her. She has always loved her strength, her mastery of her body, but now it feels like more of a liability than anything to be celebrated.

It is funny, almost. She wants to die and she just can't do it, no matter how hard she tries.

So she forces herself. She pretends to miss hitting a tree with her wires and falls to the forest floor, rolling through moss and mud. Her goal: to have the wind knocked out of her, to be unable to escape.

She can feel the tremors in the ground reverberating against her dirt-streaked cheek before she hears the shrieks of her squad calling her name over and over, trying to decide who will be fast enough to rescue her. Jean offers first, of course.

"Stay back!" she calls. "Save yourselves!"

She barely gets the last word out when a giant hand reaches out and wraps itself tightly around her midsection. The monster's grip around her body tightens. It feels a bit like his embrace, crushing her to his chest as they held each other, the last of a dying breed.

_Yes_, she thinks. _Yes._

Wrapped in the hand of a Titan, smelling blood and filth and the fear of the ones who came before her, she finally finds him. She cannot see him, not really, but he is there. She feels it. She knows it.

"Stupid," Levi says, shaking his head. "Fucking stupid."

Even as she feels her ribs start to bend beneath the Titan's fingers, her bones threatening to crack, she laughs. "I know," she replies to nothing, and then her blood sings in her veins the way she always imagined it did to him as well and she is spinning, her blades somehow exactly where they need to be as she shreds the Titan's hand into its component parts, fat and sinew and bone. When there is nothing in her field of vision but a smoking, bloodied stump, she swings herself up and around to make the necessary slices across the nape of its neck.

She wants to hear Levi tell her to take a bath when she gets back to camp, but he is gone again. No matter. She has heard what she needs to hear.

"Squad!" Mikasa calls behind her, her voice ringing out over the sound of the giant toppling to the earth.

"Yes, Squad Leader!" the soldiers cry out in unison.

"_Advance!_"

**The End**


End file.
